All human beings have the right to the economic, social, and cultural rights that are the prerequisites for human dignity and survival. In the United States, economic, social, and cultural rights are particularly contested. Among the many necessary and inalienable rights identified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are several that address the notion of economic rights. These include housing, the right to work, the freedom to choose where to work, fair and humane work conditions, protection from unemployment, equal pay for equal work, fair living wages for work done, reasonable limitations to the hours of work demanded,...

On a sleepy December weekend in 2004, just twelve days before Christmas, the Hartford Courant, the hometown newspaper for the University of Connecticut, delivered a startling gift. Splashed across the front page, above the fold, with a huge accompanying color photograph, was the headline: “As Colleges Profit, Sweatshops Worsen” (Kaufman and Chedekel 2004: 1). The face of a tired, middle-aged Mexican woman—a factory worker in a textile plant that manufactures sportswear bearing the university’s friendly Husky dog mascot and classic navy and white UConn logo—dominated the front page. The photograph was taken in a small town a few...

If many scholars and journalists are correct, long-term job security may be a thing of the past in the United States—a trend that may not bode well for the economic human rights of the U.S. workforce. Some say there has been a fundamental shift in the way employers view the notion of “jobs” and that long-term, secure employment is simply incompatible with this new twenty-first-century vision of the employment relationship in a free market society (Bridges 1994; DiTomaso 2001). In contrast to the traditional, secure full-time job, many jobs created today are “contingent” in nature—temporary, short-term work with...

Since the 1990s, Cleveland, Ohio, had developed a reputation for the terrific effect nonprofit activist organizations had on redevelopment in the city, so much so that Cleveland became known as “the Comeback City.” But the foreclosure crisis at the end of the 1990s burst the city’s bubble: real estate speculators were buying cheap, distressed property, making minimal repairs, and then quickly “flipping” the houses for highly inflated prices. In order to make that happen, the “flippers” needed the help of appraisers and, more important, out-of-state mortgage companies that were more than happy to provide mortgage loans with little or no...

All human beings have a right to the basic necessities of survival, including adequate food, clothing, shelter, potable water, health care, and education without discrimination. In the U.S. capitalist political economy and culture of competitive individualism and individual rights and responsibilities, the presumption is that each individual must be economically self-sufficient to provide to his or her own life chances. In this scenario, jobs are the antidote to poverty and compromised survival.

These rights raise important questions. Clearly not everyone can provide for his or her own life chances: children must rely on adults to provide for them, as do...

Since the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11,2001, the U.S. government has ostensibly been preoccupied with protecting its citizens from violence. But where 25,000 people died from terrorist attacks between 2001 and 2005, an estimated 25,000 die every day from another form of violence—hunger and preventable diseases (Robinson 2005). It would seem that food security is a more pressing and immediate human rights issue than security from terrorism, and yet food security remains a largely ignored problem.

In 2007, 36.2 million people in the United States lived in food-insecure households—12.4 million of them were children.¹...

The interconnected economic and social human rights are a challenging cause to mobilize around in the United States, especially given the lack of attention to economic rights domestically. In the United States, a tradition of individualistic responsibility means that we are each presumed to be personally responsible for our own economic well-being rather than that society must be organized to facilitate individuals’ ability to provide for themselves and their families. A human rights perspective emphasizes, however, that the ability to provide for oneself and one’s family is rooted in how we are organized as a society. At their most basic...

In 2005, Arjun Sengupta, UN independent expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty for the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, called on the international community to “recognize the existence of conditions of extreme poverty ... as indications of the worst form of indignity inflicted upon human beings, which should be regarded as a denial of human rights” (Sengupta 2007: 45). Sengupta was not talking about a Third World country; he was addressing conditions he witnessed in the United States in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that made landfall on August 29, 2005. In...

Education is rife with issues of equity and social justice. From the opportunity to attend quality schools, to receiving a healthy and nutritious lunchtime meal, to how special education services are meted out, public schooling is entrenched in the fight for a better and more just world. In this tradition, a central problem for education should be to engage and respond to concepts of “rights,” perhaps most important to figure out what the international establishment of human rights (denoted below as HR) would, could, or should mean in the context of educational theory, philosophy, and practice in the United States....

The health of Americans falls far short of what it might be. Although we have one of the most expensive and technologically sophisticated health care systems, our collective health suffers. Americans usually look at the state of our national health through an individualistic lens (Ratcliff 2002), a tendency that has Americans defining health very narrowly, as consisting of the physical and mental well-being of individuals. They assume that measures of public health are reducible to the extent to which individuals experience diseases, physical and mental maladies, and disabilities; seen as the result of viruses, bacteria, injuries, lifestyle choices, diet, and...

This chapter focuses on Native American land rights, a collective right based on cultural beliefs and long-standing practice as much as legal precedent. I examine the struggles of the Western Shoshone People over conflicting meanings and practices tied to their ancestral homelands and interrogate the ways they have relied on ideologically liberal human rights instruments to claim collective rights and address historical and ongoing grievances. Ultimately it is my hope that this chapter will provide an entry point for further exploration of the ways existing international human rights instruments can be utilized in support of indigenous peoples’ rights.

Generally speaking,...

The presence of “new” immigrants¹ since the latter half of the twentieth century, especially groups who trace their origins to Asia, Latin America, and Africa, has increased the cultural, especially linguistic and religious, diversity in the United States. Their presence has also led to new conflicts over the extent to which their cultures—especially their religions and languages—should be accommodated in the United States. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim and “Muslim looking” people, such as Sikh men who wear turbans as part of their religious practice, experienced acts of hatred in the United States and Europe....

When we consider political and civil rights we are generally referring to rights and freedoms in the public arenas of society and our relationship with the state. Individuals, as human beings, have a right to fair and equitable treatment by the state: we have the right to recognition as a person before the law, to equality before the law, and to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; the right to freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; the right to legal recourse when our rights have been violated, even when the violators of our rights may have been acting in...

People dropping off their children at the University of Idaho's day care on February 26, 2003, were surprised to find the parking lot overflowing with federal, state, and local law enforcement officers. The officers waited for Sami Al-Hussayen, a thirty-four-year-old graduate student, to arrive with his children, so they could arrest him on suspicion of terrorism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) became interested in Al-Hussayen when they noted his generous donations to various Islamic organizations. The FBI also found that Al-Hussayen worked as the webmaster for the website of the Islamic Assembly of North America, a group that has...

The United States has the sovereign right to decide which foreigners it wants to give permission to enter or stay. Yet U.S. law also recognizes that refugees are people with well-founded fears of being persecuted if returned to their homelands and that they have certain rights under international law, most fundamentally the right not to be returned to face persecution. Thus, there is a tension between the sovereign rights of the U.S. government and the individual rights of the refugee. Refugee rights, in short, are the exception to governments’ general sovereign discretion with respect to immigration. Governments have the right...

Media images of the U.S.-Mexico border¹ overwhelmingly portray an empty desert landscape in which border patrol agents hunt down and capture groups of migrant men attempting to cross the border. The setting is barren, lacking towns, communities, wildlife, families, churches, culture, commerce, or any form of political activity. These images, as Zoe Hammer discusses in her chapter (22) on the prison abolition movement, reduce the complexity of life on the border to a cat and mouse dynamic that encourages policymakers, media, and the general public to blame immigrants for the woes of an entire nation. These images also help to...

Carmen is a forty-three-year-old U.S. citizen of Dominican descent. She has lived in the United States most of her life but her parents live in the Dominican Republic. Ten years ago Carmen met Casandra during one of her trips to visit her parents. She describes their encounter as love at first sight. The two maintained a long-distance relationship for several years. Frustrated with the difficulties associated with a binational relationship, the couple decided that Casandra would immigrate to the United States, where Carmen eagerly awaited her arrival. Naive and ill-prepared for the difficulties that awaited them, Casandra left her family...

In 2006, Signal International, a subcontractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman—a marine construction company on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, recruited around 500 men from across India. The company needed extra workers to make up for the shortage of skilled labor following Hurricane Katrina. The men recruited reported that they had paid $20,000 to recruiters in exchange for promises of a green card and a prosperous life in the United States—a chance to realize the “American Dream.” For many, the $20,000 had meant their life savings, for others it meant selling off their lands and for still others...

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was established in 1966. The United States has signed and ratified the convention, indicating agreement with its principles defining all forms of racism as violations of human rights. (However, as did many other party states, the U.S. filed a reservation keeping ICERD from becoming “the law of the land,” suggesting that the treaty is incompatible with U.S. sovereignty.) But how well does the U.S. conform to those principles? Issues of racialized discrimination have already appeared throughout this volume. For example, previous chapters have explored racism in the...

In April 2009, the United States refused to participate in the Durban Review Conference, which was set up to assess the progress made by countries on combating racism. This review conference was a follow-up to an earlier conference that was held in Durban in 2001, on eliminating all forms of racial discrimination. The 2001 Durban Conference, attended by ten thousand people from around the world—state delegates, NGOs, and others—reignited a global discussion on the principles of ICERD, which was enshrined as part of the UN human rights instruments in 1965. The U.S. position on ICERD, which it signed...

Any conversation of human rights dilemmas in the United States would be incomplete without mention of the U.S. criminal and juvenile justice systems, particularly with regard to the practice of incarceration (Davis 2003; Herivel and Wright 2003)—that is, the caging of human beings. Where a great deal of existing research¹ focuses on adult prisons and the practice of caging people more broadly, I will illustrate the stark contrast between current juvenile justice policies and practices in the United States, and the standards set by numerous human rights instruments² on the treatment of young people before the law. Given limited...

Women’s struggle for equality with men is a recurring theme in most societies, since gender regimes have been the norm for centuries. In oral tradition it is codified in myths, songs, stories, and annual rituals. Documents reveal similar activities in countries where writing has existed for some time. For Western societies some of the earliest records date back to the fifteenth century indicating legal struggles in France (Fraser 2006). In the pursuit of equality, numerous strategies, arguments, and practices have been harnessed even though conflicts have existed between categories of women in different social locations as so well articulated by...

The place Landesman describes is one of what law-enforcement officials say are hundreds of active stash houses in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago, where underage girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Some of them have been enticed by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; some have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families. However, the scope of U.S. laws to address the sex trafficking epidemic suggests that it is essentially a global problem and not an American one....

On June 23, 1999, Simon Gonzales drove to the Castle Rock Police Station at 3:20 a.m. and opened fire. Gonzales was killed in the shootout, but he was not the only fatality on the scene. Officers found the bodies of his three young daughters, whom he had shot to death at point blank range. Gonzales s trip to the police department was not his first contact with the police that day, however. His estranged wife, Jessica, had called the police earlier that day to inform them that he was in violation of her restraining order when he did not drop...

Although the United States was a leader in spearheading international human rights efforts following World War II, and the development of international human rights instruments, it has not necessarily been among the leaders in implementing and enacting human rights. Moreover, the conceptualization of human rights and related initiatives, interpretations, and implementations are not solely topics of formal legislation and state practices. Indeed, much happens in the human rights enterprise that occurs from the bottom up, through local efforts on the ground, without the state itself, and often in fact challenging the states inaction or obstruction of the implementation of human...

Since 1945, the United States has provided critical leadership in shaping human rights institutions and treaties. It was U.S. leadership that helped to found the UN and, in its Charter, formally codified “human rights.” The United States, led by Eleanor Roosevelt as Chair of the first UN Human Rights Commission, played a major role in giving the world a “common standard of achievement” in the form of the UDHR. This core document, unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, promoted the drafting and adoption of important human rights treaties.

Under the U.S. Constitution, all international treaties...

The incarceration rate in the United States has increased by more than 400 percent since the mid-1980s. As this massive expansion has taken place, we have been encouraged by media, politicians, and popular culture to believe that our society builds prisons as a response to crime. Prisons, we are told, remove dangerous individuals from society; individuals who have chosen to break our rules, and thus threaten our collective safety. This unexamined assumption has become axiomatic in public discourse—a form of “common sense.” However, research, experiential insight, and analysis offered by prison abolitionist scholars and activists in recent decades challenges...

Contributions to this volume clearly demonstrate that the United States is far from the “gold standard” for international human rights practice. However, as several chapters illustrate, there are ongoing, successful struggles to combat human rights violations, define and develop concepts of human rights and fundamental human dignity, and—most important—to realize human rights practice in the United States. Our goal here is not to conduct or publish scholarship simply for scholarships sake, but we will take this opportunity in the conclusion to discuss what we think are some implications of this collection of work for human rights scholars, advocates,...